Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Staunton,
March 31 – Recent events show that the Russian state has agreed to act as an
enforcer for the Moscow Patriarchate, an accord that points to the further
clericalization of Russian society and that does not bode well for the many
opponents of the Russian Orthodox Church, according to Lyudmila Alekseyeva.

The
Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church has long supported the
Russian state, but now, the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group says, the state
is returning the favor, acting as its enforcer in clear violation of the 1993
Russian Constitution by making the Moscow Patriarchate “a state religion” (portal-credo.ru/site/?act=authority&id=2137).

Alekseyeva’s
comments to Portal-Credo.ru came after Russian government magistrates
intervened and seized the remains of Suzdal saints that had been kept in a
church of the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church, a group that is often at odds
with the Moscow Patriarchate but that the latter has not been able to impose
its will.

Now, the
state has intervened, a reflection she suggests of the fact that “the state has
agreed that the Church can use the state apparatus” for its own denominational
goals. In this situation, the Autonomous Church has few good options left
except perhaps to turn to the European Human Rights Court.

When the
Russian police came to act on behalf of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan
Feodor of the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church lay down in front of the
shrine, but the police simply stepped over him and went about their business. “I
can imagine the attitudes of belivers,” Alekseyeva said.

Staunton,
March 31 – Forty-five percent of Russians now say that Stalin’s harsh
repression was justified by the results he achieved as a result, a figure that
is almost twice as high as in 2012, according to a new Levada Center poll.The same survey found that the share of
Russians who believe that nothing justifies what Stalin did has fallen
significantly.

Aleksey
Grazhdankin, the Levada Center’s deputy director, says that “for the majority
of respondents, the name of Stalin as before is connected with terror, but
since the last decade there has been a growth in the share of those Russians
who give a positive assessment to what Stalin did. It reached its highest level
ever last year, he adds.

Part of
the explanation for the increase in approval for Stalin, Grazhdankin suggests,
is to be found in Russians’ assessment of the events in Ukraine. Seeing what
instability can lead to, he says, many Russians are now “prepared to sacrifice
the interests of a minority in order to preserve the current status quo and
stability.”

Five
years ago, 32 percent of the Russian sample said that Stalin was a criminal;
now, only 25 percent do, and 57 percent say they oppose designating him as
one.It isn’t that Russians love him, the
Levada Center sociologist says. Rather, they see virtues in a strong leader
when as they now think is the case their country is surrounded by enemies.

Not
surprisingly, Stalin is most positively viewed by the least educated, those
living in villages and small cities and the elderly. Young people are largely
indifferent to him, while the most antagonistic to Stalin are the middle-aged
and the relatively well-off populations of the large cities, such as
Muscovites.

Stalin remains a divisive force for
many, Ivan Nikitchuk, a KPRF Duma deputy who wants to rename Volgograd
Stalingrad, an idea that the Levada Center poll found is supported by 31
percent of its sample, says that when Russians compare their situation now with
what it was under Stalin, they draw the “correct” conclusion that it was better
then than now.

Nikolay Svanidze, a member of the
Presidential Human Rights Council, in contrast, says that “the moral
rehabilitation of Stalin which will intensify in advance of Victory Day would
be a personal insult for millions of people.”

And Yabloko Party leader Sergey Mitrokhin says that the
revival of support for Stalin reflects the failure of the country to undergo
any “de-Stalinization” during the first two post-Soviet decades and
consequently the Soviet dictator remains “an instrument” for some to resolve
political tasks such as promoting a cult of a new leader, in the present case,
Vladimir Putin.

Following
the Anschluss, Russian officials required all media outlets on the Ukrainian
peninsula to re-register. Pro-Moscow Russian-language channels, news services
and print publications have had very few problems, but Crimean Tatar outlets
have been “repeatedly and arbitrarily denied registration,” Amnesty
International says.

In the
best Soviet-era tradition that Vladimir Putin’s regime is increasingly
restoring, one Crimean Tatar outlet, the newspaper “Yeni Dunya,” will be
allowed to continue so that pro-Moscow trolls and supporters of the occupation can
point to it in order to deny that Moscow is conducting an ethnically-based
purge of the Crimean Tatar media space.

But that
is exactly what is going on. QHA, the largest Crimean Tatar news agency, has
been refused re-registration twice and has not reapplied, Amnesty noted. ATR,
the Crimean Tatar-language television channel, has been turned down three
times. It has applied a fourth time, but if it doesn’t hear by tonight, it too
will shut down lest it face heavy fines, the confiscation of its equipment, and
criminal charges against its mangers.

Other
Crimean Tatar-language outlets, including the Maydan radio, the 15minut.org
website, the newspaper “Avdet,” and the magazine “Yildiz” have not received
re-registration and will shut down. And in an indication of how sweeping this
Russian purge is, the occupation authorities have refused to register the
Crimean Tatar children’s magazine “Armanchikh” and the children’s television
channel, “Lale.”

“The fact that children’s television
channels and magazines are being forced to shut down may sound like a cruel
April Fools’ Day joke, but this is certainly no laughing matter,” Krivosheev
says.“Instead it heralds a latest stage
in an ongoing clampdown on human rights … the brunt of which is being felt by
the persecuted Crimean Tatar minority.”

And
to add insult to this injury, the occupation authorities have taken the
additional step of warning Crimean Tatar leaders not to protest these closures
lest they run afoul of Russian “anti-extremism” law.As has become typical, the officials issued
these warnings orally and refused to leave any documentation, undoubtedly so
they can deny that they have in fact done so (khpg.org/index.php?id=1427798413).

Staunton,
March 31 – The security services of Belarus are closely cooperating with their
Russian counterparts against Lithuania as far as their targets are concerned,
according to the annual report of the Lithuanian State Security Department, an
arrangement that underscores the real relationship of Mensk and Moscow and that
calls attention to a much larger problem.

That larger
problem is this: After the disintegration of the USSR, Moscow maintained its
covert presence in the other post-Soviet capitals and especially in their
security agencies and often has deployed them against third countries where
residents may be less suspicious of their actions than they would be of those
of Russian officials.

Thus, to
take a hypothetical example, a Lithuanian official almost certainly would be
less cautious if approached by a Belarusian than he or she would be if
approached by a Russian, something KGB and FSB doctrine fully recognizes and
has long sought to exploit through an especially nefarious kind of “false flag”
operation.

If that
is something one would naturally expect, another focus of the Belarusian
special services in Lithuania might not be: They are currently working in
exactly the same directions and against the same targets as the Russian
intelligence services, the Lithuanian security service report says.

Not only
are the Belarusian services seeking to recruit Lithuanian border guards, but
the Belarusian defense ministry’s intelligence administration is “aggressively
acting” to recruit agents and “collect information about military and strategic
civilian infrastructure sites” in the country.

Some of
these Belarusian adjuncts to the Russian intelligence services are at the
Belarusian embassy in Vilnius, the Lithuanian service says, but others are
operating under cover of business groups, including in particular tourist
offices.Tourist firms are useful
because they can plausibly arrange visits by Lithuanians to Belarus.

The
Lithuanian security service concludes that it is quite probable that “the
Belarusian GRUhas shared the
information it has obtained with the Russian GRU” and thus constitutes a
greater threat to Lithuania’s security than many, who consider what is going on
only about Belarus, may currently think.

Staunton,
March 31 – Foreign intelligence services are seeking to drive a wedge between
the various peoples of Buryatia, a Kremlin official told a Novosibirsk meeting
on ethnic relationsand national
security yesterday, a latest indication of Moscow’s increasing nervousness
about that strategically important republic and a signal to Buryats of just how
important they are.

Magomedsalam
Magomedov, the deputy head of the Russian Presidential Administration, said
that inter-ethnic relations in the Siberian Federal District were improving but
that in Buryatia things were going in the opposite direction as a result of the
work of foreign intelligence services and diplomats (asiarussia.ru/news/6695/).

The
Kremlin aid added that there were problems as well in Tuva (another Buddhist
republic), the Transbaikal kray (where there are numerous Buryats), and Omsk.
But Magomedov was clearly focused on Buryatia, and his words have already sparked
an active discussion in that Transbaikal republic.

Arkady
Zarubin, a journalist in Buryatia, suggested that what Magomedov had said
reflects the fact that “Buryatia is a strategically important territory for the
country,” onethrough which “all land routes
to the East pass through” and in which, thanks to Lake Baikal, there is an
enormous reserve of potable water.

Thus, he
said, “stability” in Buryatia must be maintained “at any price.”

That
Moscow doesn’t think that there is such stability now reflects the enormous
corruption in the region, the incompetence of the republic’s leadership in
appointing a Russian outsider to head the local university, and the work of the
Buryat opposition.But the role of
foreign intelligence services is obscure, he suggested.

Whenever
he has been involved in preparing protest meetings, Zarubin said, “no special
services besides the local ones have disturbed [him].Since when did these become foreigners? Or
don’t I know something?” he asked.What
is clearly goingon is that somebody
feels he or she has to blame outsiders in order to shift blame.

Buryatia,
an enormous republic which sits astride the Transbaikal region, numbers just
under a million people, who are roughly divided between the Buryats who form a
third of the population and ethnic Russians who form almost two-thirds.Maintaining tight central control over it has
always been a focus of Moscow’s security thinking.

But
talking about this reality may have just the opposite effect that Moscow
intends.That is because comments like
those of Magomedov remind Buryats like Zarubin of just how important they are
in the mental maps of Muscovites, a reminder that may lead them to make more
rather than fewer demands on the center.

And in
comparison to many other non-Russian republics within the Russian Federation,
the Buryats have two serious advantages: On the one hand, as a Buddhist people,
they are linked to Tuva and Kalmykia, the two other Buddhist nations in
Russia.And on the other, as Mongols,
they have increasingly close ties to neighboring Mongolia.

Monday, March 30, 2015

Staunton,
March 30 – “The longing for ‘former greatness’” that many Russians feel is “playing
a bad joke” on them, Olga Irisova writes in “Moskovsky komsomolets” today,
because it has led them to don “thick rose-colored glasses” and engage in deep
denial about reality, “subconsciously blocking out” anything which doesn’t fit
with their preferred imagery.

As a
result, the Moscow commentator says, “the majority of Russians cannot accept
the fact that with their support the leadership has committed a mistake which
has cost the country its economic well-being and solid international status” but thinks it is now the leader of an alliance
with China (mk.ru/politics/2015/03/29/kak-druzhili-slon-i-moska.html).

Most of
them, Irisova continues, cannot cope with the notion that “in the world at
large, Russia is viewed not as a superpower and guarantor of security but more
often as an unpredictable player.”They
think that Vladimir Putin gained stature when he threatened to use nuclear
weapons, forgetting that his role model was a North Korean leader no one
respects.

Indeed,
none of the ideas about effectively challenging the US and the unipolar world
or standing on its own or allying with China to oppose the West stand up to
even the most cursory examination, she says.Russia is in no position to dictate to China no matter how much many
Russians would like to believe otherwise.

“No one
in Beijing intends to make a fateful bet on a Russia-China union,” the Moscow
commentator says. That country isn’t even willing to recognize Russia’s
annexation of Crimea. Instead, it has given Kyiv 3.6 billion US dollars in
loans so that the Ukrainian government can end its dependence on natural gas
from Russia.

Moscow
TV’s “talking heads” for the last year have been telling Russians how
fortunate they are to have turned from the West to the East. “We don’t need
the West,” they claim. “We have a wonderful partner in the form of China.”
But in fact, China views Russia not even as playing the “elder sister” role Andrey
Kortunov has suggested.

Beijing does not even see Moscow as a sister at all. Instead, its
interest in Russia is indistinguishable from its interest in African or Latin
American countries which have natural resources China can use, Irisova say.
But Russians cannot see this through “the rose-colored glasses” they use to
look at the world.

China
is an economic giant, as is the West. The Russian economy is only one-fifth
the size of either. And in high technology areas, the gap between China and
the West, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other, is only getting larger.

Russians should be able to see this economic situation, but they don’t.
But they also are failing to see that China is playing a much larger role in
international security affairs, a role it is assuming not by entering into a
confrontation with the US and driving itself into a corner as Russia has but
by showing itself capable of playing a cooperative role.

China
is hardly likely to scrap what has been an effective approach in favor of
Russia’s which has failed, but Russians who remain in deep denial about this
as well as about almost everything having to do with the power and status of
their country can’t see it.That of
course points to more troubles ahead.

Staunton,
March 30 – Many are taking comfort in the notion that just as

Russians appear to have reduced their hatred of immigrants
when encouraged by the Kremlin to hate Ukrainians instead so too their hatred against
the latter could be ended relatively easily if Moscow changed course -- and in
any case won’t expand to include others.

But in
fact, as a panel discussion organized by Radio Liberty points out, there are
two problems with the optimistic vision. On the one hand, it ignores that there
was a reservoir of hatred among many Russians ready to be whipped up by the
government for its own purposes. Moscow did not create it; it exploited it (svoboda.org/content/transcript/26926308.html).

And on
the other, such a view also downplays the danger that while Moscow may be able
to exploit such hatreds, it could quickly lose control over them and not be
able either to restrain them once they are unleashed or to prevent them from
being extended to other groups that the regime either wants to protect or does
not want to offend.

Indeed,
to deal with this situation, the panel suggested, the regime will either have
to offer new objects of hatred in the hopes of diverting Russians from one
enemy to another or employ massive amounts of repression in order to limit the
expression of that hatred. In either case, the problems involved with such
feelings and their use are not limited or short term.

Thus,
for example, any lessening of official anti-Ukrainian hysteria in theabsence of any new target group almost
immediately threatens to provoke new outburst of hostility toward migrants or
toward other groups, including Chinese workers and industrialists in the
Russian Far East whom Moscow has every reason to protect lest it offend
Beijing.

Consequently,
thanks to Putin’s actions in unleashing and exacerbating Russian hatreds in the
current crisis, Russia and the world are entering a Martin Niemöller moment, one in which just
because they hate someone else now, there are no guarantees that they will not
hate others, including ourselves, later.

Staunton,
March 30 – The announcement three weeks ago that Prague is prepared to transfer
360 hectares of territory to Poland in the Těšín Silesiaarea is the latest indication that the
border changes in the former Soviet and Yugoslav spaces are sparking new
questions about borders in the northern portion of Eastern Europe, according to
Aleksey Fenenko.

On March
6, the Moscow State University international relations specialist notes in an
article in “NG-Dipkuryer,” Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Subotka announced the
transfer, something he said would end a territorial dispute between the two
countries that has been going on since 1958 (ng.ru/dipkurer/2015-03-30/10_europe.html).

Because
Subotka provided no additional details and because the amount of land involved
was so small, his words attracted relatively little attention. But Fenenko
argues that border disputes are endemic in the region and that “the wave of
de-Stalinization” at the end of the 20th century “has led to the
de-legitimization of the borders of the 1940s.”

That is
because, he continues, “for public opinion of these countries, references to
the fact that the borders were established by ‘Stalin’s USSR’ is sufficient to
recognize their illegitimacy.” The EU has been able to quiet “but not stop the
process of their review.” And after the Těšín Silesia case, “the process is
starting to take on a practical character.”

“Up
to the present,” Fenenko says, “border changes have taken place in the Balkans
and the territory of the former USSR. In Central Europe, on the contrary, the
borders of the 1940s have been preserved.” He suggests that “the disintegration
of Czechoslovakia … did not change the situation since it occurred quickly
along administrative borders within the country.”

Now,
however, “the situation is changing,” the Moscow specialist says, as the Těšín Silesiashows.Warsaw and Prague, under pressure from the Entente
agreed to the border in 1920. But both sides had problems with it, and
immediately after Munich in 1938, Poland demanded and got a border adjustment
in its favor.

In 1947,
following the Soviet occupation of the entire area, Poland and Czechoslovakia
signed an accord that largely restored the 1920 border; but Poland later tried
to make greater changes, something Czechoslovakia rejected.In any case, the small adjustment announced
now highlights the reality that “Poland and the Czech Republic have a problem”
with borders.

The 1938
Munich agreement between Hitler and Chamberlain is “traditionally viewed in
Europe exclusively in a negative way.”Any reference to it, including by Moscow, Fenenko says, represents a
kind of “’red line’” that must not be crossed.But Prague’s action this month has the effect of implicitly and partially
rehabilitating of part of Munich.

Could
this prompt other countries in Central Europe, and especially Hungary, to raise
similar issues, Fenenko asks. The answer is far from clear. Germany isn’t going
to question its borders: the current ones are too much part of that country’s self-definition.
But the situation with regard to Lithuania may be different.

The
current Polish-Lithuanian border follows a line established by the
Soviet-Polish treaty of August 16, 1945, but “problems of the border
delimitation between Poland and Lithuania remain,” the Moscow scholar says,
with each side having claims to portions now within the borders of the other.

On the
one hand, many in Lithuania consider portions of Poland and Russia’s
Kaliningrad oblast to be part of Little Lithuania. And many Poles still
remember when Vilnius was within Poland, not Lithuania.As a result, Fenenko says, “Warsaw could
activate discussions about the principles of the delimitation” of the border.

There is
also the possibility of disputes between Poland and Ukraine. According to the
1945 Soviet-Polish treaty, Poland gave up territories to the Ukrainian SSR;”
and “officially, Warsaw has refrained from advancing demands on Ukraine.” But
that doesn’t end Ukraine’s western border problems: it also has them with
Moldova.

The most
serious set of border issues involve Hungary and Hungarians. After 1945, some
of Hungary’s lands were handed over to Romania, others to Yugoslavia, still
others to Czechoslovakia and the USSR.In 1991, Budapest began talking about the formation of “a Greater
Hungary” that would reunite all of these.

The US
blocked that at the time by promising Hungary eventual NATO membership if it
refrained. But, Fenenko points out, “over the last few years,” discussions of
this kind in Budapest have “intensified.”Budapest now has problems with Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine, problems it
has exacerbated by demanding autonomy and offering dual citizenship to ethnic
Hungarians.

Now,
given “the precedent of the Polish-Czech negotiations,” the Moscow specialist
continues, “Budapest in the future may achieve the establishment of a
negotiation framework with Ukraine about the provision of particular rights to
Hungarians” in that country.

Fenenko’s
article is important for three reasons: First, it is clearly an effort to set
the stage for Russian demands for border changes by suggesting that this is not
a “Moscow problem.” Second, it suggests that some in the Russian capital are
interested in promoting such conflicts as a way of expanding Moscow’s influence
over the region.

And
third, it is a reminder that the West, having failed to stop Russia’s “territorial”
adjustments in Georgia in 2008 or in Ukraine in 2014, has opened the door not
only to Vladimir Putin but to other leaders around the world who may decide
that the era of fixed borders is over and that they have everything to gain by
seeking to expand their own.

Staunton,
March 30 – Leonid Reshetnikov, the obscurantist and imperialist former SVR lieutenant
general and head of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISI), says
that his organization is “one of leading” organizations providing input to
Vladimir Putin as the Kremlin leader formulates his foreign and domestic policies.

In the course
of a long survey of his views on the world and Russia, Reshetnikov provides
additional details on the way in which RISI is involved in “the development of
information-analytic materials, proposals, recommendations and expert
assessments for state structures including the Presidential Administration (lenta.ru/articles/2015/03/26/risi/).

According
to its president, RISI “is one of the analytic centers [in Russia] which
supplies the Presidential Administration with analytic materials. Besides us, I
think,” Reshetnikov continues, “the Kremlin above all relies on the reports of
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,on the work of our special services … and on
the work of other institutes.”

But “among
these other institutes,” he suggests, RISI “occupied one of the leading places.”

Reshetnikov
served for several decades in the SVR and ultimately was head of its analytic
administration. Consequently, he says, he understands what ordinary people do
not – just how reports are prepared for senior officials. Outsiders “think that
someone writes something, gives it to Putin, he then reads it as says: ‘Fine!
Let’s take this decision now!’”

That is not how things proceed. Instead, there is a
constant flow of materials “from various sides,” and this is processed again
and again at various levels in what is “an enormous analytic” process which “continues”
at each level “right up to the very top,” that is, to Vladimir Putin.

The RISI president tells Lenta.ru that Russia’s foreign intelligence
services did not have an analytic shop until “the end of 1943.”That was one of the reasons for the country’s
failures in the first months after the Germany invasion. There was plenty of
operational information, he says, but “there wasn’t any analysis” that sorted
it out.

As a result, the country’s leaders were pushed now in one
direction, now in another. Thus, Reshetnikov says, “Zorge wrote that war would
begin on June 22, but some agent in Berlin reported that it wouldn’t begin at
all, and a third asserted that the war would happen but it would start only in
December.”

Now, he continues, the situation is different. There is
an enormous analytic apparatus, and one of its strengths is that it contains
and reports “alternative points of view” up the line so that the Kremlin will
not be blindsided or trapped by a single position.

Asked about RISI’s role in the run-up to the annexation
of Crimea, Reshetnikov says that “we of course constantly prepared analytic
materials both on Crimea and on Ukraine … but I want to say,” he insisted, “that
in the preparation of the reunification of Crimea, no one from Russia took part
… it was something unexpected for all.”

Challenged by his interviewer that Putin has said that
the Crimea operation was planned, Reshetnikov suggests that it “was planned
when already everything had begun,” that the planning “went in parallel with
events,” rather than in anticipation of them even though RISI and others had
highlighted the attitudes of the Crimean population and Kyiv’s shortcomings.

“But unfortunately,” the RISI president says, “we did not
allow for the possibility that these attitudes would move toward a more
effective phase, one of action.”When
that happened, Moscow, however, was ready to respond.

Staunton,
March 30 – Most analysts have suggested that sanctions and international
isolation were a cost Vladimir Putin was willing to pay in order to get his way
in Ukraine, but Andrey Lipsky, an editor of “Novaya gazeta,” says that is
exactly backwards: the Kremlin leader wanted isolation and launched his
Ukrainian campaign to get it.

Indeed,
he suggests, Putin’s comments to the FSB leadership last week confirm that
interpretation because they suggest that the Russian president is worried that
further contacts with the outside world could lead to a repetition of the destabilizing
protests of 2011-2012 during the upcoming 2016 and 2018 election seasons (novayagazeta.ru/politics/67833.html).

And to
prevent that from happening and thus to ensure the continuation of his own
power, the “Novaya gazeta” editor argues, Putin is quite prepared to suffer
what he believes will be the short-term costs of sanctions and isolation in
order to ensure his own long-term political survival.

Since
the Crimean Anschluss and the West’s response, Lipsky points out, people in
both Russia and Western capitals have been asking why – why did Putin need to
take a step that he might have been expected to understand in advance would
entail so many costs and bring what seems to others so few benefits?

Clearly,
most of the propagandistic memes – “Russia wants to restore the empire,” “It
must defend Russian speakers from the fascist junta,” and “a desire to seize
the territories of others is in Russia’s blood” – are now explanations but
rather something that must be explained, he continues.

What
else is left? Preventing Ukraine from joining NATO and the West establishing a
base in Sevastopol? “Strengthening the security of the country? The growth of
Russia’s influence in the world? The rallying of the ‘Russian world’? [or]
Consolidation in the framework of a ‘Eurasian project’?

Very
early on, Lipsky says, it became clear that Putin’s policies in Ukraine had done
Russia more harm than good, that Russian influence in the world had declined,
its security had been compromised, that NATO had been reinvigorated under
expanded American influence, and the status of Russian speakers abroad had
gotten worse.

All this
happened not because of the West’s desire to box Russia in but because by Putin’s
actions in Crimea and Ukraine more generally, “Russia violated the [existing
world] order, and the others simply have been defending themselves.” And they
now view Moscow as a dangerous source of instability, “unpredictable and
unprofitable.”

Given
this balance sheet, the commentator says, many have simply decided that Putin
miscalculated, but quite possibly there is a better explanation. His actions in
Ukraine, Lipsky says, are “only a cover for something more essential for the ruling
political command in Russia” – the preservation of its political power.

The
Kremlin leader’s remarks to the FSB last week provide a clear indication of
this. He talked about “attempts by ‘Western special services’ to use Russian
NGOs and ‘politicized unions’ to discredit the authorities and destabilize the
situation in Russia in the course of the 2016 Duma and 2018 presidential
campaigns.”

In
thinking about these words, it is important to remember that “precisely
injustice and falsifications during the Duma elections of 2011 in favor of the
party of power led angry citizens in Moscow and certain other major cities into
the streets,” something that clearly frightened Putin and his entourage and led
to a tightening of the screws.

Increasingly,
this campaign presented the opponents of the regime as “agents” of the West,
something that required presenting the West as an external enemy. Otherwise the
moves against the regime’s domestic opponents could go only so far, at least by
making use of this ideological paradigm, Lipsky suggests.

But
until Crimea, the Kremlin lacked one thing to ensure acceptance by the Russian
population of the equating of the opposition with Western agents and that was “the
mass mobilization and rallying of the population around the existing
authorities. The Ukrainian crisis,” Lipsky says, “and ‘the return of Crimea’
provided this happy possibility.”

Whether
Putin can maintain that without doing something more for any length of time
remains an open question, but it is clearly the case, the “Novaya gazeta”
editor says, that the Kremlin is going to do everything it can to maintain it
through the 2016-2018 “political season by propaganda, the actions of the force
structures, and new legislation.”

Obviously,
“total isolation would not be profitable” for Russia even in pursuit of that
goal, Lipsky says. “But partial, with a limitation of harmful contacts and with
sanctions which mobilize the population … and explain why the economic
situation is deteriorating … is completely useful.”

And
indeed, it may “at the present stage only strengthen the arguments of the regime
which is seeking to go into the new political season” without having to face
any real danger that Putin and his regime will be challenged.

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Staunton,
March 28 – The sad fate of company towns in Russia where the closure of the
industry around which they were formed closes down, but there is a special
category of these settlements that has so far received less attention: towns
built up around prisons or penal camps that are at risk of disappearing if
their main “industry” goes away.

That may be
about to change thanks to a Dozhd television broadcast last week about the
situation in Sos’va, a small settlement in the Urals where former prisoners and
their former guards staged a demonstration opposing the closure of the prison
camp there, something that would mean the death of the town (snob.ru/selected/entry/90066).

Some 200
people took part, making this “save the prison” effort the largest demonstration
in the settlement over the last decade perhaps because it was organized by
local business people who will lose out if the camp closes down. One of the protesters openly acknowledged he’d
been inside as a prisoner long ago because of “stupidity.”

Sos’va with
a population of a little more than 7,000 is located some 450 kilometers north
of Yekaterinburg and exists because of two strict regime camps and a third for
prisoners suffering from tuberculosis. The only other industry, a wood
processing plant, went bankrupt some time ago.

Rumors that
one or more of the camps will be closed have been circulating for some time,
although officials say that no decision has been taken because no one is quite
sure where the remaining prisoners would be sent. But because almost all Sos’va’s
residents are linked to the camps as employees or former inmates, they are very
concerned about a possible shut down.

Russian
penal officials say that they are indeed closing many camps far from the main
cities as part of an efficiency drive. Dozens have been shut down already, and
both the inmates and the guards have been taken care of. People don’t need to
worry. If things were as bad as the media say, why has there been so little
protest?

But now
that there has been a demonstration in Sos’va, that too many change with
residents of other such settlements deciding that they have no choice but to go
into the streets to try to protect what little they have in what many Russians
still call “the big zone” outside of the camps by insisting that the state maintain
“the little zone” of them.

Staunton,
March 29 – The contemporary human rights movement emerged at a time when its
possibilities for action were generally increasing. Now that those
possibilities are continuously decreasing, it needs to reinvigorate itself by
recalling the efforts of its predecessors, those who fought for the same rights
as the Soviet system was institutionalizing itself.

That is
the message of Roman Popkov, a former Russian political prisoner who now heads
the Nation’s Freedom movement, in an article entitled “Legal Advocates as
Predecessors of Rights Defenders” in which he laments that the 50th
anniversary of one of those people, Yekaterina Peshkova, passed largely
unnoticed last Thursday (openrussia.org/post/view/3805/).

Russian
rights activists today, he writes, and for completely justifiable reasons
remember the dissidents of the late Soviet period, protest the closure of the
Perm-36 GULAG museum, and object to the erection of statues to Stalin.But they don’t remember as they should those
who laid the foundations for their activities a century ago.

To make
his case, he interviews, Yaroslav Leontyev, a Moscow historian, about Peshkova
and her work. Her predecessors, he says, include Fyodor Gaaz and Princess Maria
Dondukkova-Korsakova who began the fight for the rights of political prisoners
in the middle of the 19th century.

By the
early 20th century, mass political parties had formed in Russia, and
many of them created their own “Red Crosses” or “Black Crosses” to come to the aid of their own political prisoners.
Peshkova was involved in one of these as early as 1910 when she was living in
Nizhny Novgorod as the wife of Maksim Gorky.

During World War I, she was a leader
of the Help the Victims of War organization and devoted herself to rescuing children
from the front.After the Soviet-Polish
war in 1920, she was involved in the exchange of prisoners and the search for
Poles who had been exiled to Siberia. In Soviet Russia and then the Soviet
Union, she helped organize groups to help political prisoners.

In the 1920s, the Soviet authorities
openly acknowledged that they had political prisoners and allowed those who
wanted to help them access to the prisoners to provide them with legal and
other forms of assistance.Because of
that focus, Peshkova and others like her did not call themselves “human rights
defenders” but rather “legal advocates.”

The Soviet-era Political Red Cross operated quite openly
in Moscow between 1917 and 1922 and lasted in some places into the 1930s under
the same Pompolit (“Help for Political Prisoners”), an arrangement Peshkova,
because of her links to Gorky, was able to negotiate with the secret police.

Peshkova’s granddaughter told him,
Leontyev relates, that once Stalin’s secret police chief Yagoda asked Peshkova “when
will you finally close up shop?”Peshkova responded, “That will be on the day after you do!”There is a certain “black humor” in this
recollection, he says. Her group was closed down just after Yagoda was arrested
and shot.

Leontyev suggests that Peshkova’s activities have three
important lessons for human rights activity in Putin’s Russia.First, it is absolutely necessary now as then
that the political prisoners themselves organize as best they can and with the
support of outsiders to defend their rights. Often, they are the only ones in a
position to do anything.

Second, human
rights groups must define themselves in the first instance as lobbyists for the
political prisoners because that will help create a Russian civil society.And third, given the rising number of
political prisoners, rights activists now need to be concerned with something
Peshkova was: the rehabilitation and reintegration of political prisoners after
their release.

Staunton,
March 28 – The FSB continues to disseminate its version of the murder of
Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, one that links it to Ramzan Kadyrov,
not out of any concern for getting at the truth but rather because of growing
anger at the Chechen leader and the backing he continues to receive from
Vladimir Putin, according to Andrey Piontkovsky.

The
Russian force structures, he writes, “have never had any good feelings for
Ramzan Akhmatovich and are extremely skeptical about the Putin ‘Kadyrov’
project which deprived them as they understand it of their ‘victory’ in the
Caucasus” by allowing him an autonomy they would never have permitted (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=551673923B9B4).

In addition, Piontkovsky says, the siloviki are anything
but happy about the way in which Kadyrov militants are now getting involved in
fights for control of economic and even political assets “far beyond the
borders of the Chechen Republic,” something no other regional leader has been
permitted to do.

But “the last drop apparently because the provincial
version of ‘Triumph of the Will’ at the Grozny stadium,” an action that seemed
to presage a situation in which it would not be Chechnya within Russia but “’Russian
within Chechnya,’” something anathema not only to the siloviki but to ordinary
Russians as well.

All this anger poses problems for Putin, Piontkovsky
says, but what Kadyrov is doing is posing an even larger one for the Kremlin
leader because what the Chechen head has been doing constitutes a direct attack
on “the central nucleus of Putin’s mythology,” the notion that Putin is legitimate
because he restored order by means of the second Chechen war.

But at the same time, Putin can’t “close down the ‘Kadyrov’
project” because to do so “would be official recognition of Russia’s defeat in [that]
war and at the same time a declaration of a third” Chechen war.” That in turn
would represent “a return to 1999” but one in which Moscow’s “starting position”
would be “much worse.”

Caught between the need for the superficial stability in
the North Caucasus that Kadyrov provides in exchange for massive infusions of
cash and the right to act on his own as he sees fit and an equal need to
maintain his own legitimating myth, Piontkovsky says, the Kremlin leader has
not yet come down hard against either Kadyrov or his siloviki opponents.

That “testifies to the weakening of [Putin’s] regime of
personal power,” the Russian analyst says, public opinion surveys to the contrary.Everyone must remember, he suggests, that “the
power of a dictator never rests on polls. On the contrary, polls rest on the
power” of those who have it.

“Had a sociological survey existed in the USSR at the end
of February 1953, it would have found that 99.999 percent” of the population
approved of Stalin.“But several days
later,” after the latter died, that all changed not only in the population but
within the elite itself, Piontkovsky points out.

That is something Putin has to be concerned about because
“the power of a dictator rests on the qualified subordination to him of several
dozen [senior] people.” They will support him until they don’t, until a
critical mass of these critical people decide they would be better off without
him.

By raising questions about the mythology he has used to
legitimate his rule, Putin has brought that day closer, leading more people
within the elite to question where he is going and more people in the Russian
population to wonder how anyone can square the idea of “a Russian world” with
one in which “Russia is inside Chechnya.”

Staunton,
March 29 – In its new 11,500-word report on the ways in which Russian officials
are misusing the country’s anti-extremism laws, the SOVA human rights
monitoring organization concludes that one of the most important trends of the
last year is a dramatic increase in the role of the FSB in such actions.

There are
two basic sources of such misuse: excessive actions by poorly trained law
enforcement personnel who are given little guidance by the laws themselves and “the
conscious formation of mechanisms for suppression of opposition and simply
independent forms of activity” (polit.ru/article/2015/03/28/antiextremism/).

The latter
has become “much more in evidence from the middle of 2012” when the authorities
used anti-extremism laws to suppress opposition protests.“Unfortunately,” SOVA writes, “with the falloff
in opposition activity, the growth of the repressive component did not cease”
but in fact increased.

Russia’s
involvement in Ukraine has been the occasion if not the cause for five distinct
trends that the SOVA report details. First, since the Crimean Anschluss, the
anti-extremist laws have been made harsher and “’the space of illegality’ has
been broadened,” something Russian courts have not prevented but rather
facilitated.

Second, the
Russian authorities have extended the application of this legislation into the
Internet even though the nature of that sphere makes it almost impossible for
them to achieve their ends unless they are prepared to shut down all access to
the world wide web, something that would entail serious negative consequences
for Russia.

Third, the
SOVA report continues, because of Russia’s involvement in Ukraine, Moscow and
its officials have used anti-extremist laws as a way of suppressing any
criticism of their actions.

Fourth, in the
face of an ever more xenophobic environment, Moscow has doubled the number of
cases it has brought against people for stirring up hatred of one kind or
another. Not only has the number of such cases increased, SOVA says, but the
share of them which are unjustified has as well.

And fifth, because
the Ukrainian events intersect with concerns about Russian national security,
the FSB has significantly increased its involvement in anti-extremist cases,
something that has added yet another reason why such cases constitute a misuse
of the law for political ends.

But Moscow’s
focus on Ukraine in this area has not led to a reduction in the number of cases
brought inappropriately under this legislation against religious minorities and
against individuals for statements that in no reasonable way can be said to fall
within the terms of the poorly drawn laws, SOVA argues.

There are
two places where the situation appears to have become somewhat better over the
past year, the report suggests. On the one hand, the rate at which items are
being added to the Federal List of Extremist Materials has slowed. And on the
other, the number of cases being brought against librarians has fallen.

But
overall, the SOVA report concludes, Russian officials continue to misuse
anti-extremism laws and are “obviously not prepared either to liberalize” them
or even work to reduce the most obvious violations of even the formulations of existing
laws by the police and the FSB.

Staunton,
March 29 – Just as Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is giving the world a
geography lesson about places few knew about earlier, so too the Kremlin leader’s
efforts to find an ideological justification for his ever more authoritarian
and aggressive political system is offering a lesson in the history of some hitherto
neglected political thinkers.

One of the most
curious sources for Putinism appears to be a Russian prince who broke with the
National Bolsheviks when he discovered they were agents of the Soviet secret
police, married Boris Savinkov’s widow, developed his own doctrine about
Russian fascism, always defended Russia against Germany, and died in the Nazi
concentration camp at Auschwitz.

But if
Prince Igor Shirinksy-Shikhmatov is a curious source, Pavel Pryanikov argues,
he may be an extremely useful one because unlike many better-known Russian emigres
who flirted with fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, the prince never allied
himself with Hitler and always called for the defense of Russia under whatever
name against foreigners (ttolk.ru/?p=23343).

Following their
defeat in the Russian civil war, many White Russian emigres tried to find an
explanation for their loss. “The overwhelming majority of them,” Pryanikov
says, “came to the conclusion that the only ideologies capable of defeating the
Bolsheviks were national socialism or fascism (in one or another variant).”

Among these
groups were the so-called “national maximalists,” who broke with the national Bolsheviks
over the degree of the latter’s cooperation with and subordination to the
Soviet security agencies and who formed in the 1930s a Union of Revolutionized
Solidarists to promote change in the USSR without violence or cooperation with
foreign powers.

The leader of the
national maximalists was Prince Yury Alekseyevich Shirinsky-Shikhmatov. The
direct descendent of Chingiz Khan, the prince was born in 1892 into the upper
reaches of the extreme right of the tsarist bureaucracy, served in the
Northwest Army during the Russian Civil War, and lived as a taxi driver in
Paris after the defeat of the White Russian cause.

Shirinsky-Shikhmatov
married the widow of SR leader Boris Savinkov and even adopted Savinkov’s son,
Lev.As Pryanikov points out, in the
early 1920s before his return to the USSR and death, Savinkov was “one of the first
Russian fascists and saw Benito Mussolini as his ideal.”

The
prince’s group, centered around the journals “Utverzhdeniye” and “Zavtra” never
was that large. According to the Tolkovatel blogger, it had about 300
supporters in Europe, half of whom were in France and Belgium, and another 100
or so in the United States, Manchuria, and Australia.

During
World War II, Shirinsky-Shikhmatov refused to work for or even cooperate with
German occupation authorities in Paris, called for the defense of the Soviet
Union against Germany, and as a result was arrested and dispatched to Auschwitz
where he was executed sometime in 1942.

Shirinsky-Shikhmatov’s
political program called for religious freedom, a confederal state “with a
strong central power,” basic freedoms, “the coexistence of state and private
property under the general control of the state by planning,” a strong national
defense, and support for liberation movements in the colonial world and workers
in capitalist countries.

What
set him apart from other Russian émigré fascists was Shirinsky-Shikhmatov’s
ideas on how these values might be promoted in the USSR.He rejected the views of the Smenovekhovtsy
who believed that the best way was to cooperate with Moscow and those who
favored illegal armed struggle or open cooperation with foreign powers.

Shirinsky-Shikhmatov
favored a “third path,” what some called “the masonic way.” That involved the
promotion of his ideas via the recruitment of supporters from among those
within the Soviet elite who had doubts about where the communists were taking
the country and rely on them to transform the situation.

The
prince and his entourage were certain that his group should count “not on the intelligentsia
or the bureaucracy,” both of whom had been “perverted in the worst Westernizer
understanding,” but rather on religious sectarians and on those who were “outside
of the clientelist corporations.”

According
to Shirinsky-Shikhmatov, “over the last 300 years, the First and Second Rome
have externally triumphed over the Third.” But “the Russian messianic idea in
its religious form has remained alive” in religious sects and in the
Slavophiles and their philosophical and political descendants.”

Moreover,
he wrote, “the Bolsheviks have unconsciously fulfilled a certain part of the high
task: they have destroyed the inheritance of Peter I, but this is only the
first part” of what needs to be done. After them, a future Russian state “must
be built not on the foundation of the principles of ‘pagan-Roman morality,’”
but rather “on the basis of the ethics of collectivity, cooperation, and ‘the common
task.’”

Russia’s
eventual fascist revolution, Shirinsky-Shikhmatov was sure, would require the
establishment of “a dictatorship of the people” led by a dictator who would
emerge from the military or security services and gain the kind of popular
support necessary to transform the country.

Such
a leader, the Russian émigré thinker suggested, would be capable of throwing
off the “false pseudonym” that was the USSR and “proclaim to the entire world
the terrible but genuine name of the country – Russia.”As Pryanikov notes, Shirinsky-Shikhmatov did
not live to see his “dream” realized.

Saturday, March 28, 2015

Staunton,
March 28 – Moscow got some bad news this week: it is losing out to other more
technologically advanced countries in the arms sales sector, something that is
costing Russia money but also highlighting the reality that many of its weapons
systems are no longer world class as far as potential buyers are concerned.

While it
is unlikely that Russia would ever sell its most advanced weapons systems, such
losses suggest that in many areas, its weapons may not be as sophisticated as
the Kremlin likes to claim and as many of Russia’s neighbors fear, especially
since some of those neighbors are now among those edging Russia out of parts of
this market.

And consequently,
while Russia remains the second largest seller of arms in the world (behind
only the US), it may have trouble maintaining its current sales levels,
especially of equipment that requires imported parts that may not be available
because of sanctions or that uses advanced technologies Russian arms producers
have not yet introduced.

This
week, Aleksandr Brindikov, the head of the advisory group to Rosoboroneksport,
the Russian government’s military equipment exporting arm, said that Russian
producers are becoming ever less competitive on the world weapons market and
have already exited some 30 of its sectors (top.rbc.ru/business/27/03/2015/55151ae19a7947285badd2a7).

The
reason for that, he said, has nothing to do with marketing but rather that the
products the Russian defense industry is offering cannot compete with those
offered by other countries, he continued. For example, Germany, China and “even
Ukraine” are getting sales in the armored area that Russia had assumed it would
keep.

.Brindikov’s
comments are a sharp departure from those of Vladimir Putin on January 27 when
the Kremlin leader celebrated Russia’s prowess in this area, but even Putin
acknowledged that the international arms market was becoming increasingly competitive,
a possible indication that he is aware of these problems.

Anton Mardasov of Svobodnaya
pressa queried several other Moscow experts on arms concerning Brindikov’s
statements. Most were dismissive, although some did concede that Russia has
problems now in the electronics area because it must produce components that it
used to be able to import (svpressa.ru/war21/article/116991/).

But one of these experts,
Vladimir Shvaryev, deputy director of the Moscow Center for the Analysis of the
International Arms Trade, suggested that Brindikov was pointing to a problem
that goes back much further than the past year.Russia has had problems in producing and selling high-tech arms, he
said, but these problems are have been around for a long time.